360° Vendor Management

Are Your Outsourcing Vendor’s Agents Trained?

Long after the initial mega-transition is completed, changes in processes, systems, or customers require additional agent training.  You’ll surely experience the need for attrition-caused training, too.  With all those changes, and your visibility down to the agent level not-what-it-once-was, you’re faced with a difficult situation.  Left unmanaged, your quality results will slowly decline, customer satisfaction will dwindle, and those not-so-friendly calls to your CEO will start to land on your desk (accompanied by the memo asking for action and weekly status on the issue).  Soon, internal stakeholders who were riding the outsourcing fence will start the anti-outsourcing rally cry, claiming vendors have a difficult time delivering quality targets (ignore the fact that the group was probably struggling with the same issue long before the outsourcing program began!).

Because of the direct impact on quality, training should be as tightly managed as other aspects of an outsourcing relationship.  Here are a few tips to get started:

1. Create a training course catalog that contains every training class that has ever been given.  Use a college-like numbering system to keep track of these classes (e.g., 101 - New Hire Basics, 102 - New Hire Accent Neutralization, 201 - Program Transaction Requirements).
2. Since a large quantity of training is adhoc, try to bundle this type of training into a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly course.  Safe the immediate training/communication needs for urgent emergencies.  Just as in application development, fewer releases of training helps the production processes avoid disruption that occurs through constant changes.  Number these “courses”, too.  Look to update standard training courses with this new content as soon as possible.
3. Update SLA quality guidelines with all changes and manage the guidelines with careful use of version control.
4. Ask your vendor to track every agent’s completion of each training course.  Consider establishing a key measurement requiring all vendor agents to complete new training within x number of hours/days of release.  This metric will be useful for vendor managers and vendor account managers to better understand quality issues and training effectiveness, and can contribute to root cause analysis (e.g., “99% of our agents have completed the required training on time and with passing scores, so the issues we’re experiencing aren’t because of training.”)
5. Refresh frequently! Require vendor agents to complete refresher training on a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis in order to keep skills sharp and up-to-date.
6. Use training regimen to advance agent skills to new levels.  Create new classes to that challenge agents and provide them more opportunity to excel in the workplace, while creating better quality results.

Do you have comments? Let us know by posting them below and sharing with the community how to best manage training.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Outsourcing, Outsourcing Vendor Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.